Christopher Mims on seeing what’s next, filtering tools, valuable conversations, and tapping expertise

“I have all of these systems for blocking social media when I’m working, so it’s not a distraction. Everything that I do is about trying to keep information at bay, and spend less time on the internet.”

– Christopher Mims

About Christopher Mims

Christopher Mims is a technology columnist at Wall Street Journal. Before joining the Journal in 2014 he worked as a science and technology journalist and editor for a variety of august publications including Quartz, Technology Review, Wired, and Scientific American. He is the author of Arriving Today, which unveils the fascinating story of how products arrive at to our doors through the global supply chain.

Column on The Wall Street Journal: Christopher Mims

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What you will learn

• Why finding new and useful information is like language immersion (01:32)
• How Google News can be better than monitoring social media (05:07)
• How to vet or find deeper  information (09:18)
• How to take notes in a simple and efficient way  (10:53)
• What are the benefits of listening to the knowledgeable outsider (14:37)
• How to avoid false balance by seeking differing views (16:32)
• Why working with collaborators is important (18:15)
• Why athletic thinking is a good analogy for information synthesis (21:54)
• Why we have to exercise self-control in our world of infinitely available information (24:58)

Episode resources

• Language Immersion
• Google News
• Duolingo
• Card Catalog
• reMarkable 2 Tablet
• Gingko App
• Substack
• Ernest Hemingway
• Pocket

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Christopher, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Christopher Mims: It’s a delight to be here. Thank you for having me.

Ross: Christopher, you describe what you do or part of what you do is searching for needles in haystacks and exploring all sorts of wonderful information to get there. Tell me what do you do? How do you explore this wonderful world of media?

Christopher: I do it in a lot of different ways, and it keeps evolving. I think the governing principle for me is I’m searching for valuable new information that is true, useful, helps me build a worldview, and look a little bit around the corner to what’s next. Fortunately, I am not in the business of prediction. I’m not a futurist. I am not a venture capitalist. I don’t have to really see that far ahead.

As a journalist and a technology columnist, I’m really just trying to see what is next; what is the very next thing and get to that five minutes, or a week, or six months before somebody else. Or if somebody else has already gotten to it, maybe I can explain it a little more clearly to our audience, or explain it in a different way to make it more accessible to a wider range of people.
That’s a pretty doable thing, ultimately, and making it happen is just a lot of process which has happened for me because I write a weekly tech column. It is very routine, in good ways. In that, every week, I am tackling a new topic and researching it pretty systematically. That has given me a lot of chance to just practice that process.

It’s a bit like language immersion. For anybody who has learned a foreign language, you really steep yourself in it. Part of what I’m doing as a journalist, but specifically as a columnist, is what I have long called hypothesis-driven journalism, which is that hopefully, I can learn enough about a topic that I can say, Hey, I wonder if somebody is doing like, X, or Y. It seems like if people are doing A, B, and C, they might next try D, E, or F. The second-order consequence of that might be this other thing. Then I might just go and look for that.

I sometimes feel that comes a bit from my scientific training. Science is what I did before I was a journalist. I have an undergraduate degree in neuroscience. I spent a couple of years in the lab, and it was like getting a master’s degree. I mean, I certainly did that; an equivalent amount of bench science. I’ve published papers on some pretty esoteric subjects in invertebrate neuroscience. That was good practice for being in an environment with other really smart people who are just constantly trying to poke holes in your ideas. But during the generative phase, anything goes like, huh, maybe these insects are detecting electrical fields around them directly with their nervous systems.

We were testing a hypothesis at one point with aquatic invertebrates, it turned out not to be true; it would have been pretty freaking cool if it was true. That’s what I’m doing every week. I’ll just step into a topic and be like, I wonder if the coming wave of electric trucks is going to convince a bunch of people who otherwise wouldn’t be environmentalists to “Go Green”; What’s the research on that? That ended up being a very fruitful article involving a bunch of behavioral economists. As Elon Musk has taught us if you make the green choice, the exciting choice, people will adopt it, and then they’ll adopt other ideologies along the way.

Ross: I’d like to unpack that because there’s a lot in there. I think there are a number of pieces that will feed on themselves at some point. Do you articulate these hypotheses to yourself? Do you have a list of these ideas?

Christopher: Yes, definitely. I have a couple of files. One is things that are really on deck that I’m pitching to my editor next, and other things I’m just exploring and just gathering string on. There are certain tools that I use that help with that.
I think a really underappreciated tool if you’re really trying to just learn more and more so by immersion about a given topic is, of all things, Google News. It’s actually a better filter for me than social media. I try to just dip into social media occasionally, but not really get my news from it because there’s a lot of perverse incentives in social media that lead to a lot of nonsense and wasted time, as we all know.

Funny enough, Google News, does two things that help me a lot, the Google News app, or site, or whatever. One is, it has pretty decent AI, which does learn my interest. It is definitely watching what I’m clicking on, and opening, and reading, so it’s going to feed me more of that. Also, it has a pretty good for grouping news items by topics. Sometimes I’ll be reading about something that I’m interested in, like carbon capture, or whatever, and it’s pulling a bunch of news articles that are related to that even if they’re not using the same keyword, so it’s pretty sophisticated in that way.

The other thing that I noticed recently that it does, which is a bit unexpected, is if your accounts are all linked, if you’re just logged into Google everywhere, and you’re using the Chrome browser, Google knows what tabs you’re opening in Chrome, and it will then show me news stories on that topic later, in Google News.
That’s also how you learn a language on Duolingo, for example, is that you get exposed to something and then a week later, it exposes to you again, because there’s a certain half-life of your memory for stuff like that. In a funny way, these two different characteristics of the Google News app, one, would tend to push me toward being inside of a filter bubble, because in theory, they always feed me the same stuff or more of the stuff that I’m interested in already. But because I’m constantly just poking around researching other new topics, that is a different flow of information into my main newsreader. That helps me a lot.

Then obviously, a great deal of what I’m learning just comes from talking to people. It’s incredible how having a really engaged, exciting, earnest conversation with another human being is this incredibly swift filter for refining your own ideas, and finding out what’s meaningful in somebody’s field. I have this incredible privilege as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, that if I email somebody, they’re like, yep, we’ll get our CEO on the phone in two days, or next week, or whatever. I get to talk to people who are sometimes the most knowledgeable people in a field, and they’re ready to boil it down for me very quickly. That’s invaluable. That’s just a privilege of where I am as a journalist.

Ross: One of the points around Google News, or any AI, or any algorithmic news filter is that as long as you are diverse in your interests, it keeps being diverse for you in what it shows you.

Christopher: Yes, that’s absolutely key. We’re all different in that way, but one thing that I found interesting recently is most people when they